


Beyond the Dark

by DraconianDevil



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Lovecraftian, M/M, Mystery
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-05
Updated: 2016-10-25
Packaged: 2018-08-13 04:58:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 21,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7963315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DraconianDevil/pseuds/DraconianDevil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>A mystery that needs solving? Stalwart companions needed for daring encounters? Then we are the agency for you. Our adventurers will happily undertake any mission that fits the qualifications for adventure! Our fees are reasonable and scaled to the daringness and potential danger of each mission. We will tirelessly ensure that our missions will be completed and that you are satisfied with our services.</i><br/><i>Adventure awaits!</i> </p><p> </p><p>(Or the one where Harry and Liam found an agency, looking for excitement and instead stumble upon secrets and mysteries, such as an enigmatic beautiful boy with blue eyes.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Beginnings with Butter

“I’m sorry, you’re a good lad, but we just can’t afford to keep you. We’re letting you go.”  
Harry Styles smiled politely at the owner of the Dainty Bakeshop for a few seconds before the sentence seeped into his brain. With glacial slowness he blinked a couple of times and said “Oh.”

And that had been that. Mrs Kenna, the sweet old thing who managed the bread section, gave him a fierce hug and a large loaf of banana-cinnamon bread. He pretended good cheer and insisted to her and the other old ladies who worked ( _still_ worked) there that he would drop by every week, at least. Then he went home to the flat he would soon no longer be able to keep and sad cried while wolfing down the entire banana-cinnamon loaf. 

The next morning he uploaded a picture of him, face still covered in crumbs, to Instagram and captioned it “Welcomming Unemployment”. Before he could go back to his moody nap, his phone buzzed as someone commented on his picture. It said: “*Welcoming”. The commenter was Liam Payne. Harry groaned and cursed his inability to live his life without updating social networks. Liam had been his…best friend for nearly a decade now, and he had the disposition of Mother Teresa when it came to dejected people. 

Harry began to count mentally and, sure enough, his phone began to trill as Liam called him. He debated if he was going to pick up or text Liam that he didn’t feel like talking but opted instead to turn off his phone and go back to his angry nap. 

It hadn’t been thirty minutes before someone began knocking urgently on his apartment’s door. Harry resentfully got up, threw on a shirt and opened the door. Unsurprisingly, Liam stood there with a thick folder in one hand and a paper bag of what smelled like breakfast in the other. 

“So you still have three weeks and four days before you get booted out of here for not paying rent,” Liam began, depositing the paper bag in Harry’s hand and settling down beside the rumpled futon that served as bed and sofa, “and I suggest that we use that time to get yourself a new job. I already printed out a couple dozen ones that I thought you would be perfect for.”

“Liam-” 

“I’ve arranged them by order of your preference, from most enjoyable, since fun is your number one concern, to least enjoyable,” Liam continued blithely. The folder was opened and Liam began to sort them out into different piles, attaching sticky notes to the top with scrawls on them like _Technology_ and _Retail_ and _Consumer Services_.

“Liam-”

“So I already printed out the last résumé you sent me to edit,” Liam gabbed on, waving a freshly printed file, “And I already included your employment at the bakery, so no need to worry about that, but I think we should dig further in your employment history for anything that would make you stand out. You sorely need to, because you dropped out of uni and all that so-”

“LIAM, CAN YOU SHUT UP?!”

_That_ worked and Liam looked stunned, surrounded by neat piles of paper with one hand crisply holding his favourite pen. Harry sighed and sat beside him, not bothering to angle his long legs and scattering the nest of printed out futures. “I don’t think that I want a real job,” he said quietly. 

“What do you mean?” Liam said, already jotting something down on a sticky note.

That summed up Liam, Harry noted glumly. Since they were children, Liam had been that organized one, the one who had known what he wanted to do and how to accomplish his goals. Harry had been the chaotic one, the one who had bounced from school to school, from job to job; the one who had no idea where he would get money for groceries next week. 

Liam had always tried to organize Harry’s life, to make something coherent out of it, but like his curly hair, it eventually broke free from any attempt to control and channel it. That’s why, Harry reflected, Liam was a freelance accounting consultant and raked in somewhere between five and six figures at the humble age of twenty-three and Harry lived in a single room flat with nothing but Weetabix in the fridge. 

“What do you mean, Harry?” Liam asked again, face hurt. He slowly began to gather the files and fixed Harry with one of his stern gazes. 

Harry fell backward unto the futon, the light from the single tiny window blinding him momentarily. “It’s just that I’ve done so _many_ things in the last five years, and I didn’t feel like doing any of them,” he whined. Liam was still sternly gazing at him so he stood up and looked out the window.

It was nearly noon, and the summer sunlight was streaming down on the busy street below. People were coming to and from their lunch breaks in groups or alone. Cars were lazily making their way up and down the street, light reflecting form their windshields. 

And there, on the building across the street, a billboard. It was an ad for Truly Happy, Truly Butter. It hosted the image of thick, creamy butter being spread on a perfectly cut and toasted slice of bread, superimposed on a perfectly blue sky with perfectly fleecy white clouds. And below, in sensible letters, the question that rocked Harry’s world. 

**WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU WERE TRULY HAPPY?**

“Harry? You’re starting to space ou-”

Harry hurriedly shushed Liam and continued to stare at the billboard, pondering, when _was_ the last time he was truly happy? He knew he was truly happy at least one time in his life, but the most recent instance seemed to elude his reaching mind. Liam tied again to speak but Harry firmly ran a hand over his friend's face. The gesture stunned Liam into creeped out silence. In the peace of the moment, Harry immersed himself into the memory he had conjured.

He was ten years old, a little short for his age with straight brown hair and huge green eyes. His mum had given him the box the new refrigerator had come in and he had happily dragged it into an open field. Gemma, his older sister, had dropped by and they had pondered what to do with the titanic bulk of the box. Finally, Harry decided that it should be their headquarters.

“Headquarters for what?” Gemma had asked, sunlight dappling her face. 

“Our adventuring group!”

They spent the rest of the afternoon decorating the box with Gemma’s poster paint. When it had come to naming their endeavour, Gemma had suggested “Adventurers, Limited”, a word that she and Harry were never really clear on and had seen on multiple company adverts. That night they had snuck out of their house to sleep in the box, the smell of the field and the still-wet paint engulfing them amidst the sound of their giggling and the crickets. 

The box had become their haven throughout that troubled summer, as their parents wrangled their way through an extremely messy divorce. Whenever the shouting and the blaming would get too intense, they would slip out unnoticed and camp in their box, regaling each other with imagined exploits of the Adventurers, Limited. 

The box had been destroyed the same rainy day that Harry last saw Gemma, weeping in the backseat of their father’s car. His mum had held him tight, for she knew he would have ran after her in the howling rain that had so violently ended the summer. 

Harry turned back to Liam, who was waiting nervously behind him, pen twirling in hand. “Liam, I know what I want to do.” 

The website was well made, bold and fun but holding a touch of class as well. The homepage was very firm on what Adventurers, Limited considered “adventure.” The very first thing that any visitor to the site would read was a blurb made my Liam.

_A mystery that needs solving? Stalwart companions needed for daring encounters? Then we are the agency for you. Our adventurers will happily undertake any mission that fits the qualifications for adventure! Our fees are reasonable and scaled to the daringness and potential danger of each mission. We will tirelessly ensure that our missions will be completed and that you are satisfied with our services._

_Adventure awaits!_

Of course, for the first week, Harry received multiple e-mails for his services. Unfortunately, nearly three quarters of them were invitations or demands for sex and the remainders were such mundane tasks ( _Need help with heavy lifting and stove cleaning_ ) that Harry immediately deleted them. All calls were taken by Liam, who politely and firmly refused any one whose “missions” fell in the two previous categories.

It wasn’t until two weeks had passed that they finally got an adventure.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The poll for what case the boys will work on for the first time has officially been closed! And the winner is: THE HOLLOW HOUSE!


	2. The Hollow House, Part 1: A Dread Fascination

_The sounds coming from the chamber was the most despicable amalgam of organic and inorganic noise; fleshy rending noises and desperate ululations competing with piercing flutes and hacking steel. But lording over this profane cacophony was the ever-rising shouting chant of a single word: “Alyabar!”_

_And as the dreadful symphony reached an indescribable and unbearable crescendo, I peeked into the chamber itself and I saw…_

_I saw what no mortal eyes were ever meant to see._

_May God help us all._

  


Harry surreptitiously scratched himself in the backseat of the taxi. Liam had insisted that they dress formally for the meeting with their first ever client and had shown up the day before with a beautiful three piece suit. Harry, who had been wearing nothing but his black boxer-briefs, was taken aback by the clothing.

“This is Saville Row!” he had exclaimed, “That’s like fucking expensive!”

Liam had merely raised an eyebrow and peered at him through his glasses. “Where else would you want me to buy suits?”

“But I have a suit! From that time I was a chauffeur. And I have a dinner jacket,” Harry had retorted.

Liam had looked at him archly. “There are dinner jackets and there are _dinner jackets_. This is the latter.” They stared at each other for a few moments before they both burst out laughing.

“Alright Eva Green, I’ll wear it. Thanks for the suit.”

Harry was snapped out of the memory by Liam tossing an iPad on his lap. A photo of a stern looking man gazed up at him. He picked up the device and turned to his friend. “Is this the guy who hired us?”

“He’s the client, yes, but the one who contacted me was his daughter,” Liam began, “The man is Lord Calder, minor nobility and quite the philanthropist. Eleanor, his daughter, is a biochemistry major. She works for Crossfire Pharmaceuticals, also does a lot of charities and trips to Africa and such.”

Harry swiped through the photos on the iPad and found ones of Eleanor Calder, a slim and beautiful brunette. She looked nothing like her father, having a kinder cast to her face. The effect was highlighted by the many well-documented altruistic activities that Liam had managed to find.

He handed the iPad back to Liam, who was shuffling through the attaché case he had brought. There seemed to be an awful lot of paperwork inside. Some of the papers looked sinister, with cramped texts and official-looking headers and insignias. “What are all those?” he asked.

Liam glanced up and resumed his examination and cataloguing of the contents of the case. “Stuff I had a lawyer draft up, non-disclosure agreements, safety waivers and other legal things. Things we need to make all this above-board and discreet. Ms Calder was very particular with discretion”

Harry whistled. “Wow, what is he hiring us for, anyway? It’s nothing too shady, is it?”

“His daughter wouldn’t say over the mobile,” Liam said and glanced out the window, for the taxi had stopped. “You can ask him yourself, we’re here.” He handed the driver their fare and stepped out briskly, adjusting his own suit and his glasses. Harry followed and noted with vague disappointment that he had managed to wrinkle his own attire. Must have been his inability to sit for any period of time without fidgeting.

They were in an immaculately maintained street in Belgravia, the sidewalks practically sparkling under the early afternoon sun and what few vehicles there were to be seen were ridiculously expensive. The townhouse they were in front of was the largest in the street, its façade imposing and bleached white. It was a house designed to bolster the prestige of the inhabitants.

He joined Liam at the front door and pressed the intercom. The door buzzed open immediately and a prim assistant ushered them inside.

  


Lord Calder, as it turned out, was in an important engagement in Westminster. Eleanor Calder was to instruct them on their mission instead. She was dressed in a creamy blouse and a pencil skirt, the simplicity of their design belying the expensiveness of the clothing. After refreshments had been set and the assistant banished from the sitting room, Eleanor turned to them and swept a calculating look over the two men.

“You are not what I expected,” she said as she sat down opposite Harry and Liam. Harry noted (thanks to a brief tenure as a beginner’s ballet instructor) that she had the grace of one classically trained and bred.

“And what was it that you were expecting, Ms Calder?” Liam replied, taking a small sip of the tea they had been served. “This is excellent, by the way,” he added.

Eleanor tapped a finger thoughtfully on her lips. “Older, more experience _men_ , Liam. And Eleanor would do. But I guess that this adventure, as you would call it, would be better handled by younger people. It’s something that may require imagination and a more open mind set, I believe.”

Harry leaned forward then, his curiosity and ego both tweaked by Eleanor’s cold reply. “And just what is it that your dear old daddy wants us to do, _Eleanor_?” he said, investing a scornful familiarity with her name. Liam shot him a warning look but remained silent. Evidently, he did not appreciate her patronizing tone as well.

Eleanor smiled, though the gesture didn’t reach her eyes. “I must confess, I lied to you. I only used my father’s name to impress you into accepting this job. You’re going to work for me, at least for the duration of this…adventure. I hired you specifically because the police or other more established organizations would undoubtedly be noticed by my father.” She stood up and turned on a huge screen in the far wall of the room with a remote.

“You see, I’ve recently been curious about the past of my family. They say every family has skeletons in their closets, and I want to dig out ours.” She pushed a button and a high resolution photo of an impressive Gothic manor appeared on the screen. It was a pile of spires and buttressed walls, tall windows and vaulted roofs, in a vaguely pyramid shape. “This is Exham Priory, my family’s ancestral home. And it will be your home until you finish your adventure, as you insist on calling it.”

She looked at them then, and Harry saw distinct uneasiness in her hazel eyes. “You see,” she murmured, an edge of nervousness seeping through her voice, “I found papers in my father’s office. They were pages from, I don’t know, a journal of some sort from the early eighteenth century. Whoever wrote it was manic, I could tell, the handwriting was extremely sloppy. It said that the Calders of Exham Priory were the masters of a cult.”

She had begun to twist her hands, her anxiousness spilling out. Harry reached out to comfort her but Liam firmly grasped his arm and shook his head. Eleanor took a deep breath and continued. “And that they… _we_ … worshipped something unholy in the house. And that we did things, terrible things, to appease it.”

Eleanor fell silent then, and the room was equally devoid of sound. Even the outside world seemed to have been muted. Liam finished his tea and took out his pen and a small notebook and scribbled something in it.

“D’you keep the pages? Can we see it?” Harry said abruptly, for Eleanor had begun to lapse into a troubled stupor. She jumped a little at the sound of his voice, grace gone in that split second of surprise.

“I took photos of the pages with my phone, just passages that I thought were relevant,” she said, slowly, deliberately. She was beginning to regain her cold composure. “I wanted to document the whole thing but I heard father arriving and I left.”

“And when I came back to do just that, it was gone.”

“I’ve tried to find any other files and books and such on this cult my family was supposed to have been part of,” Eleanor continued, “but either my father had them all collected and hidden or some other ancestor did. The only link to our past that I did manage to find is this house. And if I hadn’t looked through our real estate holdings, I would have never known that this is our ancestral home. I’m quite convinced that any evidence on whether what that journal claimed was true is there.”

Liam finished whatever he had been writing and spoke. “And our job is to disprove the claims of the missing journal of manic anonymous author from over two centuries ago?” Harry nearly gaped at his friend. It was very rare for Liam to let loose with the sarcasm, and his tone had been extremely patronizing.

Eleanor, to her credit, let the remark and its tone slide off her. “Or prove it,” she said, “Either way, I will consider your mission complete.” She reached behind her seat and handed Harry a bulging manila envelope.

“Train tickets, stipend, print outs of the journal pages and maps of the area,” she said. “No one from the nearby village is to know what exactly you are doing, in fact I prefer it if they don’t know that you’re there at all. I don’t have keys or blueprints of the house, so I leave it you how you’re going to investigate the place.” She sat back down and surveyed Liam and Harry.

“If my father finds out about this, or if you’re arrested or anything, I can’t help you. You are on your own, so stay out of sight and stay out of notice.” She turned to Liam, that faux smile on her lips once more. “Now, I understand there a lot of things that we need to sign?”

  


The sun was beginning to set, day succumbing slowly into night, when Liam and Harry emerged from a busy tube station and walked out into the busier streets of the surface world. The buildings and towers had vomited their inhabitants out into the dusk, headlights blazed through the asphalt endlessly and people murmured to each other and into the air.

It was time like this, Harry mused, that the city was inarguably alive, a semi-sentient organism comprised of streets and souls. He glanced at Liam, who was deep in thought and had seemingly left his body to merely walk beside Harry.

Harry removed his jacket and tie, draping them over one arm while the other fished a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket. With one hand, he inserted a cigarette between his lips and lit it. He hipchecked Liam and offered the pack. Liam absentmindedly took a stick and walked with it clamped between his lips unlit.

For the last six months, Liam had been trying to quit the habit he had developed during the stressful climb to his current state of success. At his most overwrought state, he could demolish two packs a day, one hand redolent with nicotine while the other flipped through graphs and breakeven analysis tables. One day, Harry made the mistake of choosing _The Fault In Our Stars_ for their movie night.

Since then, Liam tried to curb his addiction, having become deathly afraid of cancer, by taking a cigarette but never lighting it. Harry privately thought that his friend merely wanted a conversation starter.

It was definitely a shock for Harry when Liam took the lighter and touched the flame to the stick. Liam stopped walking then, and took a deep drag. He closed his eyes and exhaled, breath jittery from the first true taste of nicotine in months, and took another hit. But when Liam began hyperventilating, smoke escaping his lips in ragged wisps with every breath, Harry‘s concern quickly turned into alarm.

Harry put an arm around Liam. “Liam, what the- what’s wrong?” he said, leaning closer to the other man. Liam was shuddering under his coat and jacket, the hand holding the cigarette jittering, making the ember-crowned tip weave ethereal designs in the darkening air.

“I just…I’m terrified, Harry, and I don’t know what of,” Liam said in a shaky whisper. “The moment we finished signing all the papers, and we agreed, we _obligated_ ourselves to that job, I felt afraid.” He took a long drag of smoke and exhaled it in short, erratic puffs as he let out dry sobs. Harry felt that if he let go of Liam, he would sprawl unto the sidewalk, crushed by the weight of the visceral, unnameable fear coursing through him.

Harry held his friend tightly in the middle of the sidewalk, the closest he held Liam in years, as he finished the cigarette to the filter. Pedestrians walked by and around them, unheeding and uncaring. Harry ran his fingers gently through Liam’s short hair, fingertips etching soothingly into the other man’s scalp.

After the spent stick was dropped and ground unto the cement, Liam straightened up and gently pushed Harry away. His face was still ashen, but the trembling seemed to have gone away. In silence, he hailed a taxi and began to climb in. Liam paused and spoke, not turning to look at Harry.

“I don’t know what we’re going to find out there, but whatever it is…it’s going to be the death us.”

Harry stood there by the sidewalk for some time, enough time for three more cigarettes to be consumed, before walking the rest of the way home. He didn’t tell Liam, and he probably never will, but at the same time Liam said the feeling of terror had descended upon him, something had also grown within Harry. And all through the night, as he lay in his futon, it continued to do so, like some dread seed germinating in his heart.  
It was the feeling of most joyous anticipation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for this being posted later than expected, but writing and editing two introductory chapters to two cases was rather more difficult than I anticipated. Adepts of the Lovecraft Mythos undoubtedly know Exham Priory from "The Rats in the Walls." I just borrowed the name, though, so do not expect the events of that story to be replicated.
> 
> To those who wanted Sometimes They Come Back, do not worry, there are more polls to come!
> 
> Once again, thank you for reading and I will post the next chapter within the next week...probably.


	3. Hollow House: Sea of Fog, House of Shadows

_The master of this abhorrent rite stood at the heart of the chamber, his shrieking congregation still coated with the liquid remnants of their mutilated, violated victims. It covered the walls like paint, it decorated the floor like a scarlet carpet. By all that is holy, they had been so violent in their harvest, the arterial sprays had criss-crossed the gnarled roof!_

_There was so much blood…_

_Enough of it to make a pool that came to the knees of the cowled and chanting architect of this abomination._

_His droning voice rose to subdue the shrieking of his adherents, its sinister sonorous song vibrating the walls, the floor, the whole of this accursed house and maybe the entirety of reality with its anathematic syllables and blasphemous words…_

_As this acoustic heresy groaned on, a black ichor began to drip from the apex of the chamber…_

  
  


The train sped through the countryside, tiny towns and villages, the entire lives of rural folk bypassed in a matter of seconds. Harry found himself craning his neck to look back at more than one of the settlements, memories of his own small hometown compelling him. He loved the city, loved the anonymity it provided and the promiscuity it afforded, but Cheshire would always be his home.

Beside him, Liam was absorbed in studying satellite images of their destination. Exham Priory was so far north it was almost in Scotland, built on top of a hill that overlooked a small lake and the village from which the mansion got its name. They had not spoken in the four days since their meeting with Eleanor Calder, Liam instead sending Harry e-mails of what equipment they needed for their adventure.

Harry jumped a little when Liam broke the silence. “We have to stay in the house itself,” he announced, shutting down his laptop and leaning back, eyes tired behind his glasses. “If Eleanor wants us to be as circumspect as possible, staying in whatever inn or hostel is available in the village is out of the question.”

“What about food and stuff?” Harry asked, “They weren’t in the lists you sent me so unless you can stretch my emergency potato crisps for however long this takes, we might result to cannibalism.”

“If you read the journal pages, that won’t be the first terrible thing to happen in that house…or the worst,” Liam muttered grimly. “The train stops about three towns away from Exham, we can stop in a Tesco in any of them and pick up supplies.”

“Hold on, we’re gonna lug all our equipment through _three_ towns? How are we gonna find this cult if we get hernias?”

“Its three towns and about fifteen kilometres of fields and farms, to be exact, and of course we’re not going to go there on foot,” Liam said patiently, “I had a rental sent to the station.”

  
  


“Well,” Harry murmured quietly, “you did pick something for hard travel.”

They were in the train station parking lot, the few passengers who disembarked with them scattering into the town. And before them was an army jeep, complete with dark green paint and camouflage tarp. The only thing missing was a burly soldier with a rifle.

“Where the hell did you even get this?” Harry asked while loading their trunks and bags into the vehicle. Liam waved a hand nonchalantly and got in the passenger seat. Liam didn’t drive, though he had learned how to. Though his family had moved to Cheshire when he was thirteen, Liam had grown up in London, and he found public transport more efficient and less costly. Harry, on the other hand, had grown up in a town where having no car meant walking or biking, and so he had learned how to drive.

Liam pulled out a map from his coat, it was covered in neat notations and symbols in his hand, and consulted it. “So we go down this road for about a kilometre and then turn left, that should take us out of here and then it’s just a matter of following the road,” he explained. Liam resumed his study of the map until he noted that they hadn’t moved from the parking lot. He turned to Harry, who was looking at him expectantly.

“What’s wrong?”

“Well, you’re the navigator,” Harry answered, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, “isn’t there something you have to say?”

“Do I have to?” Liam groaned. Since Liam wouldn’t drive himself, Harry had become his chauffeur for a brief stint. Liam had forced him to buy a suit for a uniform, in return Harry had demanded something in return. Firstly, that Liam would officially be the navigator, because Harry never used his mobile for GPS purposes. And the second…

“We agreed on this Liam,” Harry said while he took out a cigarette and lit it.

Liam sighed and intoned gravely. “Course laid in, Captain.”

Harry smiled and replied, “Engaging warp drive!” They sped out of the parking lot, Harry’s chestnut curls whipping about as he whooped, cigarette trailing smoke.

“You didn’t even watch the original series!” exclaimed Liam as he stuffed the map back into his coat. Harry fancied that he would become a great Starfleet captain after watching the new Star Trek movies. Liam thought that with Harry’s employment track record, he’d be lucky to be a redshirt.

“Yeah, because Chris Pine isn’t in them.”

  
  


They stopped at the town before Exham for supplies, enough to last them at least a week. Eleanor had been extremely generous with their stipend, but Liam adamantly refused Harry’s pleas that they buy enough bubble-gum tape to cover a person. The town was soon left behind them, buildings and houses giving way to empty fields and craggy hills. They continued down the road, driving through silent countryside, until Liam directed Harry to turn abruptly into a gravel path that bit deeply into a ring of high, windswept hills.

In the depths of the gulley, the afternoon sun dimmed considerably. Harry silently thanked Liam for the jeep, for the path was so rocky that they jounced and tumbled more often than not. A lesser vehicle would have cracked an axle already. They turned a corner and Harry brought the jeep to a stop.

Ahead of them the path disappeared into a solid wall of fog that filled the narrow canyon. It boiled as if alive. And hungry.

“Jesus,” whispered Liam.

Harry exhaled. Within him, the feeling of anticipation, of eager anticipation, had welled at the sight of the wall of fog. He gave Liam a comforting pat on the arm and drove into the wall. The fog stretched its tendrils as if to consume them, and for a minute the world dissolved into coiling vapour and cloying muted greyness. They broke through the wall and Harry once more stopped the jeep.

They were in a small valley, an almost perfectly circular bowl surrounded by the high hills. In the middle was the lake, as black and cold as a dead eye staring straight into the sky. A small cluster of houses and a handful of buildings, barely visible through the fog, made up the village of Exham. Beside the lake, rising from the sea of fog that covered the floor of the valley, was the hill.

It looked like a great whale surfacing from the grey abyss, facing the west, three sides protected by steep cliffs, the eastern side sloping down gently into the valley below. It rose about two hundred feet into the air, and on its flat top, was the gothic monstrosity that was Exham Priory.

It was even more sinister in real life, its narrow windows and spires projecting a menacing and expecting aura that no photograph could convey. It seemed like a squatting beast, eyeing them as potential prey from its lofty perch.

In silence, Harry forced the jeep off of the path into the fields, the downward tilt of the land pulling them inexorably towards the looming hill and to the dread house.

The fog proved a blessing, for there would be no way that any inhabitant of the village could see their vehicle as it climbed up the eastern slope of the hill. Even when they cleared the fog and stopped in front of the gates of the mansion, the hills that surrounded them made a permanent twilit pall. Liam urged him to park in the shadows of a few twisted tress that grew around the walls of the mansion.

Harry slung his backpack on one shoulder and heaved one of their trunks out while Liam fetched the rest. They made their way to the tall forbidding gates and found that the iron portals were open. They glanced at one another but continued towards the structure itself.

The great wooden doors of the mansion lay in darkness, the shadows of the spires and vaulted roofs heavy. Harry tried the doorknob and was relieved to find them locked. To find them open would have been a major red flag, for what if Lord Calder employed villagers to clean and maintain the house? Or worse, what if he had guards in place?

Liam waited patiently with their luggage while Harry extracted a small pouch from his backpack. It contained a number of thin strips of metal with variously carved notches. When they were still in university, he and Liam had shared a small flat. While Liam had always remembered his keys and had three spares on his person every time he went out, Harry almost always forgot his own. Exasperated at having been called out of a lecture for the sixth time in a month, Liam had scathingly joked that Harry should invest in learning how to pick locks.

Harry had taken the suggestion to heart and had indeed learned how to pick locks from the internet and from unsavoury fellows he met in his late night jobs. Liam fervently denied that Harry possessed such skill in public, but had actually benefited from it on multiple occasions, such as the infamous Shower Debacle of 2011.

It took Harry a few minutes to open the door, but when at last the wooden door yielded, it swung silently. Harry noted that this meant that the house was maintained enough to have its hinges well-oiled. He was vaguely disappointed that the door had not followed the cliché of creaking ominously.

Liam stepped though the entrance first, heart pounding. The windows of the entry hall let little enough of the diffused light through, and he half-dreamt that the shadows were coiling. Abruptly, music exploded behind him, a cheap tune of mystery and exploration. He barely stifled a shout as he rounded on Harry, who was holding his iPhone out. The music blared from its speakers.

“What the fuck is your damage, Harry?” he hissed.

Harry raised his eyebrows. “What? It’s the tune from _Scooby Doo_ , you know, the same one that plays every time they enter the abandoned theme park or hotel or castle.”

Liam mentally counted to ten and shook his head. Harry giggled and muted the device. They ferried their belongings into the entry hall and relocked the door. Somehow, Harry felt that they had been safer outside in the fog.

They set up their things in a living room they found left of the entry hall. The furniture was all draped in white dustcovers, silent spectres that gave Harry goose chills. The stone fireplace that dominated the room was clear of ash, and the room itself was well-swept and free of cobwebs and the usual trappings of an abandoned demesne.

Liam nudged Harry and pointed to a wall sconce. It had a light bulb installed in it instead of a gas nozzle. “Lord Calder must use this place more often than we thought,” murmured Liam. Even though they were probably alone in the building, Liam privately felt that it was listening to them, waiting for them to reveal their secrets.

nodded in agreement. “This place has been cleaned recently, too. Professionally. I can smell some top shelf disinfectants and glass cleaners in here.” To pay for his leisure activities, Harry had taken a number of odd-jobs while in uni, and eventually, when he dropped out, to pay for everything.

In the five years since he left Cheshire, Harry had been a baker, a chauffeur, a club DJ, a waiter, a call centre agent, a sex phone operator (Liam had approved of that one, since it was both high paying and Harry had a natural bedroom voice), a housekeeper, a babysitter, a butcher, a photographer (unsurprising, as it was his major in uni), a ballet instructor (despite having almost no knowledge of ballet and only having YouTube tutorials as his own references) and an auto mechanic.

Invariably, he had been fired from all of those jobs. Lack of a strong work ethic and a penchant for mischief and flirting had been the primary cause. He could have stayed in the babysitting agency, but Mrs Platt had been adamant that they sack him. She had not been pleased by the way Mr Platt had winked at a lasciviously grinning Harry.

“Let’s settle in for the night,” Liam decided, “we can explore the house in the morning.” They exchanged a look that said “It’s not cowardice, its common sense.”

Together, he and Harry covered the windows of the room with the dustcovers, to prevent the lights that they would use in the night from leaking out. The room had no doors, however, only archways on both ends. So instead, they blocked one with an antique couch and the other with two massive wingback chairs. The meagre defences provided only the illusion of security, ersatz barricades against what could be hiding in the shadows.

After a light dinner, they shucked shoes and coats and took their places on the floor, unfurling bedrolls. The silence in the house was oppressive, and the light of their two LED lamps seemed incapable of dissipating the gloom in the room, much less the dark that lingered in the empty archways.

Liam curled himself in front of the fireplace. The flue was narrow, he told himself, much too small for anything to crawl down. He clamped his eyes tightly and tried to forget what he had read in the few excerpts that Eleanor had found. Out of sheer will power, he managed to slide into sleep.

Harry, on the other hand, stretched himself under the covered windows, his LED lamp in the dimmest setting. He hadn’t read the excerpts; he had been far too busy acquiring their tools and equipment. Sleep eluded him still, he missed the dull throbbing pulse of the city, its steady thump of cars, shouting, music and alarms. He turned to look at Liam, in truth only about fifteen feet away, but in the night, he seemed to be a small huddle an eternity away.

Once, long ago, Harry reminisced, they would have been sleeping together, legs entwined, Liam enfolding Harry in his arms. That had always lulled him to sleep, the security that Liam’s presence afforded him. Harry mused that he was lucky Liam was still his best mate. From what Harry he, most people didn’t remain best friends with their exes.

A brittle breaking sound echoed from the deeper darkness in the archway that led away from the main door.

Harry sat up at once, every muscle tense. His pulse thundered in his ears. Staying low, he made his way towards Liam. If there was someone in the house, it would be wise to have back-up. He kept his eyes on the gaping archway, searching in vain for the source of the sound. He shove his friend hard, jostling Liam awake.

The other man opened his mouth to speak, eyes still clouded from slumber when Harry motioned him to stay silent. Liam was suddenly alert and fully awake, unfurling his limbs and crouching on the balls of his feet. Harry signalled towards the empty portal.

Another sound drifted out of the vacant, inky space: a soft, scratching sound, barely louder than a whisper. It went on for a few seconds, then abruptly stopped, only to begin again in various intervals. The choking silence of the house seemed to magnify the sound, making it grate the ears.

Harry picked up his LED lamp and together, he and Liam crept past the arch, bypassing their furniture barricade with ease. They continued with painfully careful slowness towards the scratch-scratching sound. It came inexorable and variably from somewhere father down the corridor of rooms, each one shrouded in sepulchral night. Harry noticed that each room was at an angle, so that the rooms formed a gradual curve.

At last, the two men came upon the penultimate chamber, the room before the one where the noise was echoing from. In here, the noise was still soft but somehow still painful to the ears, each scratch attacked Harry’s ears like a nail. The next room was shielded from view by both the curving of the structure and by a pair of tall iron-bound doors. They were slightly ajar, and from that space of a foot both the sound and flickering candlelight emanated.

Abruptly, mercifully, the noise stopped.

Silently, Harry and Liam moved to opposite sides of the gap between the doors. Harry turned off the lamp, but held it tightly. Liam had both hands in fists, shirt suddenly taut from tensed musculature. Whoever thought that just because he was a financial consultant meant that he was weak would be in for a brutal surprise. Liam’s primary sport had been boxing, and he continued it as an exercise to this day.

A shadow blotted out the feeble candlelight. It moved from side to side at first, as if examining something before it stopped. By the vague outlines, both Harry and Liam knew it was a person. Or something in the form of one.

Another sound began, the barest suggestion of a man whispering. Harry couldn’t make out anything of the susurrations, but it carried an air of malice and harshness.

Liam caught Harry’s attention by waving. In pantomime he relayed a brief plan of attack: Harry would hurl the lamp at the person’s torso and while the person was distracted, they would tackle him to the floor.

The shadow had not moved, but the whispering was gaining volume, and it was definitely a man’s voice. Harry readied the lamp, arm poised to throw. Liam raised a hand to forestall him, three fingers raised. Three.

The shadow expanded as the man raised both arms to either side, the broken syllables and harsh phrases he was whispering were becoming more urgent. Liam lowered one finger. Two.

The candles in the next room seemed to flare, the shadow of the man becoming more distinct in their heightened flare. Harry heard the man gasp, whether from a sudden effort or surprise, he did not know. Liam lowered the last finger and nodded. One, and _go_.

Harry ducked between the ironbound doors. The chamber he entered was vast and circular, perhaps a ballroom or a great hall. One half of the room was covered by thick burgundy curtains that cascaded from the ceiling. The ceiling itself rose at least thirty feet above him, ribbed like the insides of the great beast the house so resembled in spirit. An ornate and maliciously spiked chandelier hung in the nexus of ribs, like an iron heart.

Below, the dark wooden floorboards were marred by an enormous and complex pattern that had been scribbled by chalk. Harry had no time to register it completely in its immensity for majority of his attention was on the man who stood in the middle of the delicate whorls and jagged lines of chalk. A dozen or so candles were arrayed in a semicircle in front of the man, their unnaturally powerful flames making it hard to see him in detail. He was a dark outline wreathed by yellow splendour.

But an outline was sufficient. Harry hurled the LED lamp at the man with all his strength, aiming exactly for its chest. It shot through the air like a cannonball, Harry running in its wake.

The man moved like a cobra, sinuously dodging the projectile and dashing towards Harry with dangerous grace. Something glittered in either hand, like fangs. Harry half turned to ram the rapidly approaching stranger with his shoulder. From the corner of his eyes, he registered Liam emerging from the dark at a dead run.

Harry was a heartbeat away from the stranger. He braced himself for the impact. But again, with serpentine speed, the other man dropped to the ground, his momentum carrying him feet first under Harry’s shoulder. In a blur of movement, the man kicked Harry’s feet out from beneath him. Harry toppled through the air and to the ground. He heard Liam shout.

Harry’s head collided with the hard wooden floor. And the world disappeared in an explosion of light that was soon devoured by hungry darkness.

  
  


His mind floated in that sea between consciousnesses.

_Ichor black as onyx drip drip dripping on my skin helpme Pain as drip drip dripping flood of onyx ichor forced its way into my pores my flesh my skin my meat my mind my soul help me not completely onyx the ichor but studded with minute points of light like stars_ **ALYABAR** _melding melting the ichor infuses me fuses to my bones to my muscles to myself Help Me no not light not stars but eyes a sea of darkness staring out at me in me with me is me with eyes inhuman animal human demoniac_ **ALYABAR** _this is not me but it is me now has become me become one with me now I am it as it is me Opener of the Way Harbinger of Whispers_ **ALYABAR** HELP ME PLEASE HELP ME SAVE ME HELP ME

**HELP ME**

  
  


Harry was smashed back to the shores of consciousness. He was on his back in the middle of the great circular room. Straddling him, black jean clad legs firmly trapping Harry’s arms, was a devastatingly handsome man. His eyes were dark and large, with almost feminine lashes. A fine dusting of stubble covered a jawline that could cut glass. His dark hair was long and pulled back into a narrow tail. A leather jacket hugged his sword-lithe frame.

And his delicate and slender fingers were pressing the glinting edges of two knives to either side of Harry’s neck. If Harry were to move his head to either side, they would bite deep. So instead he stared straight up and ahead. He mused that in a different context, their position could provide delicious distraction.

Harry mentally berated himself for thinking about sex in such an obviously dangerous instance.

“Who the fuck are you two?” hissed the man. Harry heard a shuffling of feet somewhere beyond his view. Liam’s voice came from the same direction, tone even and calming.

"Put the knives down, please. We’re not going to hurt you.”

The man laughed bitterly. “The fuck you weren’t, like hurling a bloody lamp at me wouldn’t sting. Charging at me like a bloody fucking bull.”

Liam remained silent for a few seconds before speaking up again. “We heard you scrawling your hopscotch grids and got surprised. We thought we were alone here, that’s all, and we got scared.”

“The fuck are you two doing here anyway?” the man growled, still tense like a coiled snake. Harry heard Liam inhale slowly, and he winced. Liam was a financial consultant, a field in which any form of dishonesty could lead to ruin. After all, firms and individuals hired him to tell them what state they were in fiscally and what to do to better the situation. Lying to them about either would surely lead to disaster in all but a few occasion. And so Liam was an inept liar. Not terrible, merely inept.

“We’re shooting a ghost hunting YouTube video,” Harry blurted out. The man looked down at him incredulously. Harry flashed him a small grin and continued in a rush. “Me and Liam, we want to get in on that whole ghost hunter thing but everybody’s gone to Glamis Castle and the Tower of London so we looked for creepy castles and such that no one’s been to before. And then one of my mates tells me about this place and we looked it up and saw that no one’s done something like that before here and so yeah, here we are. ” He flashed the man another smile after his torrent of lies.

The man was frowning down at him with a look Harry felt was reserved for complete morons. At the moment, Harry felt like one but mentally congratulated himself for the brilliance of his deception. If the stranger demanded any confirmation, they had bags full of video recorders and cameras, most equipped with night vision and even infrared.

Abruptly the man stood up and stepped back, knives somehow disappearing into his sleeves. Harry scrambled upright and, never taking his eyes of the man, walked to Liam, who was pale with both fear and possibly rage. Harry tried to brush off the chalk that had transferred to his clothes, but gave up after Liam hissed at him to pay attention.

“YouTubers, are you?” The man considered this for a moment before grinning. It made his face light up somewhat, softening his sharp features. “Well, she told me not to _tell_ anyone about it. But nothing about not _showing_.”

Liam’s eyes suddenly narrowed. “She?” he asked. “Who is _she_?”

The grin was gone in an instant. “None of you damn business, that’s who she is.” A knife slid into one of his hands. The serpent bares its fangs, Harry thought absently.

Liam, however, was undaunted by the show of force. “That depends,” he countered politely, almost as if they were discussing whether to order fish or chicken, “Is she Eleanor Calder? Because if so, then yes, she is absolutely our business.”

The man froze, face utterly expressionless, lips parted but wordless. Liam spoke on. “Let me hazard a guess. She hired you to see whether her family dabbled in cult worship and sent you here. I expect that somewhere in your belongings is an envelope with maps, satellite imagery and maybe what remains of a stipend. You were told that staying in the house was the only option if you were to remain unnoticed and unseen and she was particular about both of those.”

“How the fuck do you know all this?” the man said hoarsely. He was looking at Liam with the apprehension of the hunted. He clutched the knife in a death grip.

“She sent us here, too,” Harry said quietly. “Not to be all Ackbar or anything, but I think yelling ‘It’s a trap!’ maybe somewhat too late,” he added in a more jovial voice. “Hi,” he continued, waving cheerfully at the man, “name’s Harry, Harry Styles, but you can call me Cult Victim Three.” Liam swatted him on the shoulder, hard.

“So, now that’s been cleared up,” Liam said, sternly, “who the fucking hell are you?”

The man drew himself up, still armed. “Zayn Malik. And this is far from cleared up. There’s something wrong here, something wrong and alive.” He stalked to the bank of melting candles and blew all of them out except for one. In its erratic light, he was ghoulish instead of striking. He made his way towards Liam and Harry. “And whatever it is, it’s waking up. And it’s gonna be hungry.”

  
  


Somewhere in the hollow house, a great misshapen cocoon of a dark glossy, glassy substance that could be mistaken for onyx began to slowly liquefy. Jagged shards and cracked facets began to ever so slowly bubble. Miniscule runnels of it began to splatter on the bone-strewn ground. In its heart, two points of light, stars in the black crystalline sea, ignited.

They were blue as ice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this was such a long ass chapter but I needed to get the ambiance of the house through. Well, welcome Zayn to the eldritch party! Thank you again, to borrow from Stephen King, Constant Reader, if i have any. And to anyone who did not have the pleasure of watching the old original Scooby Doo cartoons, this is the tune Harry plays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUz9kFm_zbc


	4. Hollow House: The Higher Arcana of Lower Creatures

_The ensanguined madmen swayed in ecstasy as the drip became a trickle. They crooned in almost lustful adoration as the trickle became a waterfall. They shrieked in orgasmic worship when the waterfall of damning black ichor stopped, and in defiance of all earthly physical laws, levitated and coalesced into a massive rippling orb of darkness incarnate._

_The hooded celebrant ceased his baleful invocation and surveyed his nearly catatonic flock. Upon seeing that his insane followers were too deep in adulation, too far from rationality, too lost in awe, he made his way to that which I had ignored purposefully, that pile of discarded parts and hacked appendages and crushed skulls that were the hapless victims._

_He shoved the remains aside, searching the heap of blameless carrion until he unearthed his quarry. I almost rushed out of my hidden vantage point, for he had dragged out a naked young man._

_The boy was struggling, weeping, pleading for help. He was smeared from head to toe in blood, making him look both pathetic and gruesome. Absolute terror had sapped his will, drained his strength to resist, for the vile priest dragged him relentlessly towards the sphere._

_Oh God, I wish I had had the decency to have at least tried to rescue him, even though such an endeavour would have surely meant my death. Instead I watched, spellbound and horrified, the hooded man strike the boy on the head. The poor young man slid to the abattoir’s floor in a heap, stunned but alive._

_The orb of liquid night slowly rippled, as a pond’s surface on a breeze. And then, tiny droplets of it began to condensate and splatter, not on the floor but horizontally towards the young man. His eyes suddenly flashed open. They were blue, I remember, blue as cornflowers._

_What followed…as for what followed, it drove me mad._

  
  


Zayn, inarguably the most dangerous man Liam had met in his life so far, refused to share more in the night. “I don’t trust the shadows in this house,” he had said when Liam asked him why, “they listen and who knows who they report to?” He pulled a worn backpack from behind one of the curtains that covered one side of the room before asking them where in the house they were staying. The three of them returned to the living room in silence, with only the single candle to keep the eavesdropping shadows at bay. 

Upon reaching their makeshift camp, Harry slumped back unto his bedroll and into sleep. Exhaustion, and a slight concussion, had taken their toll on his usually limitless energies. Liam, on the other hand, knew better than to sleep when a strange man with at least two edge weapons loitered nearby. He watched from his bedroll as Zayn carefully set the candle in the middle of the room before reclining on the couch that blocked the other archway. 

It went without saying that he did not trust Zayn, if it even was his true name. The man had surely been hired by their own employer; his reaction upon hearing Eleanor’s name was proof enough of that, but he was armed and had no compunction in threatening bodily harm, maybe even death. 

He threatened Harry. 

  
  


Liam had met Harry when they were both thirteen. The sudden shift from the city to sleepy Holmes Chapel had been almost unbearable to Liam. He had left behind his friends, his usual haunts, his _life_. Being in the confusing throes of puberty had not made it any better. Alone, angry and displaced, he had taken to running in the vast fields that seemed to be so abundant around the town. Running had been a passion of his back in the city, and it was all he could take with him to that sleepy town. 

One day, fresh from a particularly gruelling run, he had let out all his built-up angst by screaming at the top of his lungs in the middle of a field. In hindsight, it had been a stereotypical teenage angst scene. The only thing that had spoiled it was someone laughing at him, though not unkindly. He had looked around wildly and saw a cherubic looking boy with the widest green eyes slowly walking towards him. 

“Y’know,” the boy had begun, “if you _really_ wanted to be dramatic, you should have done that in the rain, shaking your fists at the clouds. Also, you should have yelled out ‘No!’” 

“I would get my trousers all muddy,” Liam had replied, completely nonplussed by the suggestion. The boy had simply shrugged and extended a slightly mud-streaked hand. 

“I’m Harry.” 

They had become fast friends. In truth, Harry was the only friend Liam ever had in the five years he had lived in Cheshire. In that period, Harry changed his life. He was the one who suggested that Liam switch to boxing, so that the local bullies would back off. He helped make Holmes Chapel home instead of exile. 

But he had affected Liam’s future simply by living the way he did. Liam would never admit it, and would never tell Harry, but seeing the chaos and randomness that Harry used from his life choices to the simplest of everyday decisions had scared him. He couldn’t conceive how his best friend could live like that. 

So Liam decided to live according to a plan; to his plan. While Harry chose his major at university by drawing lots, Liam had chosen his two years prior. While Harry let his Twitter followers decide what groceries he would buy, Liam had a meticulous monthly list. 

He often wondered why he was still friends with someone who was an absolute storm of disorganization, much less why he they had been in a relationship for a full year. The answer was always the same: without Harry, Liam’s life would be incredibly dull. Harry was the necessary entropy in Liam’s universe. And besides, Harry had never once asked Liam to fix any of his major disasters, and always insisted that he himself try to sort it out first. They balanced each other, messy and meticulous, spontaneous and scheduled, rational and random. 

And so when Zayn had pressed his knives to Harry’s throat, he had earned a special place in Liam’s mind. He almost never hated anyone, it was a waste of time that could be better used in improving one’s life. But when he did, his hate ran deep. Liam had a mental gallery for people he hated. He called it Fuckers’ Row. Once, it only had one person: Harry’s father. Now, it had two. 

  
  


Zayn’s sudden chuckle made Liam jump a little. He had not realized that Zayn had been watching him in return from the couch. Even lying down, the man was alert. The weak luminescence of the candle had hidden the other man’s dark eyes. “What’s so funny?” he asked coldly. 

“Judging from the way you’re glaring at me,” Zayn said idly, turning on his side to look Liam squarely in the face, “you either want to shag me or kill me. Which is it?” 

“Neither,” Liam replied in the same frigid tone. And then, without thinking, he added, “I don’t do either to criminals.” 

“What makes you think I’m a criminal?” 

Liam blinked in the half-shadows. The retort had come to him unbidden, as if by reflex. It was the mental equivalent of someone automatically attempting to catch an approaching ball. Liam searched for an explanation, for a deflection. At last, after a few seconds, he said “The way you held your knives. And your whole ensemble, with the leather jacket. It screams ASBO, at least.” 

Zayn looked at him a beat longer than was comfortable. But then, Liam felt that any look from Zayn, for any amount of time, was and would be uncomfortable for him. “You’re not far wrong,” he murmured before turning his back to Liam. After a while, his breathing deepened and evened in slumber. 

Liam fell asleep shortly afterward. And in his sleep came dreams. In his dream, he stood before a jury of Zayns, thick iron chains covering him like a cocoon. In the judge’s podium, a hooded figure in robes hemmed with dripping blood yelled “How did you know?!” at him in an inhuman voice. 

In his dream, he cried out “I just did!” over and over again while the twelve Zayns shook their heads and delivered in one voice the verdict: “Guilty of all charges.” One of the Zayns produced a knife, but unlike the knives of the real Zayn, it was made of a hateful red crystal, hilt wrapped in gold wire, its edge viciously toothed. The dream Zayn twirled it in his fingers before making it disappear again. 

In his dream, the hooded, bloody judge pounded a gavel. In front of Liam, helpless in his chains, a sphere of oily nothingness coalesced. “Alyabar take him! Take him! He is guilty, take him, Alyabar! Bear him to the Outer Darkness!” the twelve Zayns screamed. The judge continued to strike down with his gavel, and with each strike, Liam was pulled closer and closer to that black sun. 

He howled, tried to break free, but all efforts were useless. He could do nothing but be drawn towards the sphere. When he was but an inch away from its all-consuming ebony surface, the judge shrieked in his alien voice, “ALYABAR!” At the word, at the voice, a thousand points of light sprang into existence on the orb. Not lights, Liam realized in maddened fright, _eyes_. All different, all wide with terror. All looking at him. 

The gavel was brought down one final time and before Liam was sucked into the unplumbed depths of that abomination, the last thing he saw were two eyes that had opened in front of his. They were human eyes, perfectly blue. 

Liam woke up not with a scream or a start, but simply by opening his own eyes. Anaemic sunlight was leaking through the dustcovers that blocked the windows. He sat up and shuddered, remembering his nightmare. The candle had been blown out sometime during the night, he noticed. He stood up and stretched before approaching the tangled mess of limbs that was Harry. After some considerable effort, which involved gradually intensifying jabs and much insistent hissed threats, he managed to rouse his friend. 

Zayn had been awakened by the noise involved in successfully pulling Harry from sleep. In the dawn light, the aura of dangerousness he seemed to emanate faded. It did not disappear, merely diluted by the sun. Like a shadow, it could be weakened but it could never disappear. 

“G’morning,” Harry said slowly, a monumental achievement in Liam’s reckoning. Harry’s normal voice was already more drawl than anything else, it hardly seemed possible it could get any more sluggish. Zayn grunted to show that he had heard the greeting but said nothing. 

Liam shook his head and doled out their breakfast. Each of them got a cup of fruits in syrup, two granola bars and a tin of coffee-drink. Liam refused to acknowledge any caffeinated beverage in a tin as real coffee. Harry wolfed down his share in under two minutes. 

“So,” Liam said, after he had collected all the wrappers and cans into a bag, “tell us why you were hired and what were you doing last night.” Zayn merely shrugged and got comfortable on the couch. Harry sat cross-legged in the middle of the room, shifting from time to time. 

“I’m a specialist...of sorts,” Zayn began, “My methods are unusual, that’s for sure, but I think the Ice Queen hired me because I don’t advertise any of my victories.” 

“What do you mean?” Harry chirped from the floor. 

“I mean I don’t have a website, or a blog, or a YouTube channel or even a fucking Facebook page. None of that shit. I’ve been doing this for about two years now, and nobody except my clients know what it is I do.” Zayn lapsed for a moment into contemplative quiescence. “Or what I’ve done,” he added quietly. Liam was almost sure the look Zayn shot him was imagined. 

“Anyway,” Zayn continued, “it just goes to show how clever, or how loaded, Eleanor is to manage to find me. I swear I’ve never done business with anyone remotely connected to her, but about three days ago I get a call.” Suddenly, he laughed. “Jesus, if you saw my face when she told me how much money she was going to shell out just to get me to come out here.” He paused to wipe away a tear of mirth. “I mean, my talents aren’t cheap, but fuck…”

“What _are_ your talents, Zayn?” Liam broke in. 

“I’m an occult detective,” he proclaimed, a note of pride and excitement in his voice. “Can’t say for sure if I’m the first, but I’m definitely the best, at least in the UK.” 

Liam burst out laughing. It was simply too silly to be serious about. Zayn’s face was instantly a mask of rage, dark eyes flashing with furious fire. Harry, on the other hand, was merely contemplative. 

In between bursts of mirth, Liam choked out his question. “So, do you solve occult crimes or do you solve crimes with the occult?” God, and he had thought that Zayn was a serious threa-

Liam stopped that train of thought immediately. Zayn maybe a deluded idiot, or a persuasive con man, but that did not make him any less violent. Or skilled in combat. Underestimating him simply because he believed in magic would be a potentially fatal mistake. And Eleanor was no fool, she wouldn’t have just hired Zayn if his skill set was fraudulent. So Liam forcefully tamped down his laughter and resumed his mask of cool indifference. 

“Actually,” Zayn snapped, in a voice that was so scorching it was practically a solar flare, “I solve occult crimes with the occult. Never been called a fake for long. Not after I show them what I can do.” The heat in his voice spoke of many arguments and fights about the subject. The way his fingers had clenched into a fist spoke of an urge to hurl knives being unheeded. 

“So what was all that with the chalk and candles and creepy chanting?” Harry asked, quite sincerely. Harry was probably the most open-minded and trusting person Liam had ever met. What Liam took with liberal amounts of scepticism, Harry could accept provided that it was thoroughly explained. They had once spent a very dull but highly informative afternoon at an astrologer’s stall, all because Harry demanded (with his most winning, dimpled smile) that the woman explain exactly how Mercury could cause trouble in one’s life. 

“A divination ritual,” Zayn replied, anger momentarily abated by the query. “The chalk lines conduct and contain power, like how electric cables have energy but must be insulated. And the creepy chanting was an Enochian plea for answers.” 

“Enochian?” 

“A secret arcane language. John Dee, Queen Elizabeth’s court magician, was the first to record and use it. It works better than Latin in spells.” 

“And the candles?” Harry was leaning forward, eyes wide with fascination. 

“A conduit for the answers. The medium through which my chant was answered.” 

“What about the one you brought here last night? That one,” Harry continued, pointing at the mostly melted candle that still stood on the floor. “Was it like for protection or something?” 

Zayn raised an eyebrow. “No. It was dark.” 

“Oh.” 

Zayn chuckled a little. “Sorry, mate. Not all candles have something to do with the supernatural.” 

“Did it work, your _ritual_?” Liam butted in. It was hard to keep the edge of impatience out of his voice, but he thought he managed admirably. The contempt was even harder to mask, what with all the talk about chalk power lines and secret languages and bloody candles. 

_Sharp_ and _cutting_ were too mild adjectives for the glare Zayn gave him. “Vorpal” was more the word. “Yes, and no,” was the terse reply. 

“You know what,” Liam began, all reserves of patience gone, “you scared the shit out of us last night, threatened my friend and all we’re getting from you is some gibberish that would make Professor fucking Trelawney proud.’ He got to his feet and his voice was beginning to rise. Harry scrambled from sitting to standing, green eyes wary. “Now, Eleanor wouldn’t have hired you, _after_ she already had us on the job, if you weren’t any good, but for all we know, you’re just a glorified con artist with a good pitch. So for fuck’s sake, did your Hogwarts bullshit work or not?” The last was basically shouted at Zayn, who was breathing heavily but was otherwise relaxed. For some reason, that only added fuel to Liam’s ire. 

Zayn stood up slowly, sinuously, like the snake he so resembled. “I’ll show you,” was all he said.

  
  


The great room where they first met was no less eerie in the morning. The daylight, anaemic elsewhere in the house, was even weaker in here. One curving side of the chamber was dominated by floor to ceiling windows, but the burgundy curtains they had seen the night before all but rendered them useless. Liam guessed that the room was built on the very edge of the western side of the hill, so that the windows overlooked the small lake and the village that hugged its shores. 

The labyrinthine design that Zayn had drawn on the floor was both beautiful in its immensity and graceful in its details. It combined the intricacy of a spider’s web and the contemplative aura of mandala, despite its origins from humble chalk. Here and there, the design was smudged from the scuffle and the excitement that had interrupted its maker. For a moment, Liam believed that it could gift answers out of thin air, a seer of chalk.

But then his rationality stepped in and it was once more just scribbles of powdered bones, nothing more. 

Zayn led them to the half-melted semicircle of candles. Rivulets and puddles of wax coiled around their bases. Inexplicably, the whorls of the chalk design had somehow contained and guided them. He crouched and motioned them to do the same. 

“There are images in the wax,” Zayn explained, examining the melted mess critically, “The answers to my question”. Harry nodded and looked at the wax intently as well. Liam thought that the same psychological quirk that allowed people to see shapes in clouds was at work in Zayn’s mind, but did not bother to mention it. 

“What did you ask?’ Harry murmured, glancing at Zayn from the corner of is eyes. Liam suppressed a flash of irritation. 

Zayn, dark eyes still searching and reading the tallow, replied without looking up. “I asked what had happened here and who was to blame.” He reached out, eyes suddenly grim, and pointed at the mess below one of the candles. The wax had fanned out instead of pooling or turning into one lump so that dozens of tiny fingers of wax branched and snaked out from the main river. 

“I think this answers the first one,” he said in a flat voice. “Look.” 

Liam and Harry both leaned closer, examining. It was Harry who first saw something, and backed away, eyes widening with fright and the colour draining from his face. “Fucking hell, they’re screaming!” was all he exclaimed before shuffling back. 

Perplexed, and quite sure that he would see nothing out of the ordinary, Liam bent lower. And finally saw it, finally saw _them_. On the tip of each of the fingers of wax, a tiny face had somehow formed. The faces were crude, just two pinpricks for eyes and slightly larger one for mouths. 

And every one of the wax faces was screaming, miniscule mouths agape in nameless, mindless terror. Even their pinprick eyes seemed to beg for salvation, pleading for someone, anyone, to hear their wordless, waxen wails. 

Liam felt bile rise to his throat. Only the sheer embarrassment that would result from him blowing chunks in front of Zayn kept him from vomiting. “What were they? _Who_ were they?” Harry was saying, still ashen faced. Liam already knew, if the wax was true, whose faces those were. And if Zayn had received a similar briefing packet from Eleanor, he did, too. 

“Sacrifices,” Liam said hollowly, and in the cavernous room his voice echoed, “innocents sacrificed to something called Alyabar.” At the strange name, Harry shivered and hugged himself. Liam remembered it distantly from his nightmare, being shouted by a voice that grated his soul. Zayn had moved to examining a different portion of the candles’ discharge. “Whoever wrote the journal claimed that they were killed somewhere in the house.” 

A slight refraction of light made Liam look at Zayn. The man had produced one of his knives again and was using it to pry a large, circular mass of wax from the floor. “Alyabar,” he said, turning the circular piece in his delicate hands, “The Opener of the Way, Harbinger of Whispers, The Covetous Dark.” 

Harry stood up and grabbed Zayn by the shoulders. “Do you know what it is? What is it?” he demanded. His eyes were blazing, urgency and fright warring in their suddenly dark depths. 

“I don’t know much beyond the name,” Zayn replied roughly, pulling away from Harry’s grasp. “And its symbol: a black circle, studded with eyes.” He tossed the piece of wax to Liam, who caught it deftly, delicately, with outstretched hands. 

“I saw its name in the worst books, the ones that were written by nutters, the ones that were burned in their time for being heretical. If it was worshipped here, there’s gonna be scarier shit than melted faces.” Zayn studied the two of them as he spoke, eyes probing for weakness or hesitation. “The wax isn’t proof enough, not if we want to get paid or fulfil whatever agreement we have with Eleanor. That means searching this whole fucking house.” 

Zayn’s gaze sharpened, and focused on Liam. He felt pinned by those dark eyes, his very being skewered and examined. “That means working together.” Harry made to speak but Zayn raised a peremptory hand and he shut his mouth. “Can we do that Liam? Work together?” 

“I can tolerate your methods,” Liam conceded. He felt a flush rising from his chest to his face. He had never been under such scrutiny. For the first time in his life, Liam felt what it was to be truly _seen_. 

Zayn shook his head and began walking towards him, gaze never faltering, and eyes steady. “Tolerating them won’t do, not if we want to succeed _and_ survive.” He was so close now, that Liam saw tattoos peaking from under the lapels of Zayn’s jacket. His right arm must be absolutely covered in them for their inked designs to almost reach his neck. 

And suddenly, Zayn’s face was inches away, those hypnotic eyes were so close, Liam could see that there were rimmed red from sleeplessness and stress. He could smell the permanent lingering smell of tobacco on Zayn’s breath, and felt a pang of longing for their carcinogenic comfort. “Liam, I need you to _believe_.”

Under such inspection, there could only be surrender. “I will,” Liam whispered. Zayn held his gaze a moment more, an age, before reaching down and taking Liam’s hands in his and raising them. He still held the circular pool of wax. Innumerable, irregular holes in them made it seem like lace. 

Each hole was roughly the shape of an eye. 

“You better,” Zayn whispered back, “because there are fouler things than me out there.” And then he was striding away, out of the great room and out of sight. Liam exhaled a breath he didn’t know he held, and Harry went to his side. 

“You alright?” Harry asked as they followed Zayn back to the living room. Liam honestly didn’t know how to answer so he just shrugged, held his silence, and thought. He thought he should feel violated by the intensity of Zayn’s scrutiny, thought that he should feel rage at having given ground to man of dubious morals. 

Yes, he _thought_ he should feel those things. But he didn’t. Instead, he felt relief at being seen, at relinquishing. Unacceptable, if his plans in life were to come to fruition. But he held on to something: part of him had escaped those prying, piercing eyes. His mouth had said _I will_ , but his heart had lied. The thought of such a seemingly minor triumph made Liam smile. 

From such small triumphs, he mused, were wars won. 

Harry looked at him askance when he smiled, but did not ask why. Instead Harry began to laugh, an infectious sound that evoked the same senseless happiness in Liam. Wheezing with laughter, they traversed the curving, shadow-haunted chambers of Exham Priory. 

  
  


The echoes of laughter drifted down the recesses of the house. In the hidden sanctuary, the echoes were almost drowned out by a disgusting splattering noise. A quarter of the great cocoon of shimmering ebony had already dribbled on the decayed remnants of the long-ago massacre. Little by little, more of it covered the hacked bones. Soft, pale blue light bathed the room, discarded radiance of the twin points at the heart of the madness in onyx. 

Rising from the top of the cocoon, exposed by the slow thaw, was a hand. At the sound of laughter, at the sound of life, they began to twitch, fingertips weaving in the cornflower blue light. 

The castoff, liquid darkness jerked into motion, slithering off of the bones and the stained rock floor to form a new entity. Drop by drop, the cocoon gave its mass to the new formation; mother to the child, river to the sea. The new formation was not a mere sphere or a twisted shelter. 

It writhed with grasping tendrils, crawled with segmented legs. It was lunacy made corporeal. It was made to hunt, to stalk, to catch. And it had already heard the music of its preys’ laughter. 


	5. Hollow House: Methods of Inquiry

_I fled. I am ashamed of it. I did not aid the poor boy as the foul thing…as it…My God, my God!_

_I ran from the macabre chamber, up and out. I ran down, down that hallway that, in my maddened state, seemed to curve away into eternity. I ascended from that dire temple, I descended from the house. Some atavistic instinct directed me through the eternal sea of fog that hides the horrors of this village. My shoes were lost in my flight, my feet tore from the rocks of the path that led away, away, away from Exham._

_When I emerged from my madness, I was in a facility in London, a sanctuary for those who lost their wits. The orderlies say I had been found screaming and tearing my hair a few miles outside of the city. I had not stopped running from Exham and the wounds I had accumulated from my journey had festered._

_The doctors swear that they could not have saved my legs; that amputation had been the only way to ensure I would not die. Only my insanity had kept me running, a more rational person would have collapsed from the pain and exertion._

_I am a prisoner here. The staff refuse to believe I have regained my mind, refuse to believe my story. Even if they would allow me to leave, how far can I run on my ruined legs? They will surely find me now, an amputee locked in a room. Death is preferable to what they could or would do to me._

_And so I have written this testimony, my testimony, of the diabolism I witnessed in Exham Priory, in the home of the Calders. I hope it finds its way to those who are willing to believe, to prove, to vindicate my claims. They must be stopped, for if not, far worse may happen._

  
  


The rest of the morning, if such a term was appropriate for the wan thing that passed as day in the depressing depression that was Exham, was to be spent in investigating the manor. Before that could happen, Liam insisted that the three of them view their collected assets. 

Harry arrayed the equipment he and Liam had brought with them on the carpeted floor of the living room. It consisted of three DSLR cameras, three camcorders, four sound recorders, an amply supplied toolkit, two crowbars, four heavy duty flashlights, a pack of road flares, a basic first aid kit and their laptops. All the electronics had extra batteries, even the laptops. 

Harry was thankful for Liam’s preparedness and possible paranoia. The gravity of the situation hadn’t really sunk into him until he had seen the anguished, screaming faces in the wax. It was one thing to be in a massive, shadow-infested manor and quite another to be in a massive, shadow-infested manor that had been the site of mass ritual sacrifices to a dread entity. 

The sound of Liam clearing his throat made Harry look up from their gear. His friend was looking at Zayn with a slightly smug expression. If the other man was impressed by the extent of their readiness, it did not show on his handsome face. Zayn simply opened his backpack and laid out the tools of his trade. 

Harry first noticed the inordinate amount of candles that Zayn had brought with him. They came in assorted scents and colours, from blood red with flecks of silver to pale green streaked with black, and their slightly twisted shapes indicated that Zayn had made them himself. Next came a pack of common chalk, an ornate Tarot deck tied in a length of black ribbon and a small wooden box full of phials and vials of mysterious substances. 

The most ominous instruments, however, were a trio of large leather-bound books, each of obvious antiquity, and four knives with bone handles. One was large enough to be a butcher knife, another was a slim misericord, the favoured weapons for coup de graces. From their sheen and colouring, the blades were made of pure silver. 

With their assets accounted for, Liam formulated the plan for investigating the manor, with Harry and Zayn adding and improving to it. They were going to map the rooms of the house, from the ground floor up. As each room was mapped, the three of them would search for clues. None of them were to split from the group, for safety’s sake. Harry also insisted in leaving one of the video cameras on in the living room for surveillance purposes, since the bulk of their supplies and equipment would be left there. Despite Liam’s barely disguised contempt, Zayn was going to secure the room with a protective incantation and runes. 

While the occult detective scrawled delicate swirling pictographs in the archways of the living room, Harry drew Liam to the entrance hall. “What is your problem with Zayn?” Harry whispered, glancing over his shoulder to make sure the man in question was still busy and on the other side of the room. 

Liam squinted at him through his glasses, as if Harry had spoken in some unknown language. “He threatened to kill you!” he whispered back, “And he wants to solve this case with _magic_ , Harry! This is our first case, if we fail this because of him, we might never be taken seriously, and you’ll go back to being unemployed.” 

“Okay, the threatening to open my jugular I get,” Harry replied, “but why can’t you just give his way a chance? The wax thing worked. I don’t know what you saw, but I definitely saw those…faces.” Involuntarily, he shuddered. That was one image Harry could do without, but he doubted anything short of neurosurgery could ever remove it from his mind. 

Liam let out an exasperated sigh. “I don’t know what it really was, but have you ever heard of that psychological effect that makes people see what they want to see? It works with clouds, tea leaves. Why not wax?” 

“Why can’t you just believe?” Harry pleaded. For the record, he _did_ know of that effect, though the name eluded him. But he wanted Liam to get along with Zayn, at least for the duration of their alliance. It wasn’t like he was asking Liam to befriend the man. The atmosphere was already tense enough without the two of them arguing. Or glaring at one another, as if hate sex was about to break out at any moment. 

“Because he doesn’t believe either!” Liam hissed, eyes suddenly blazing. “How dare he ask me to believe when he doesn’t?” 

Harry hurriedly looked around for Zayn, but the man was standing in the middle of their makeshift camp, reading something out loud from one of his books. He held the misericord in one hand, its wicked tip winking in the wan light. He had rolled back the left sleeve of his jacket, revealing an arm taut with wiry muscles but clear of tattoos. “What do you mean? What are you talking about?” Harry asked under his breath. 

“Last night, before you charged into the room, I was watching him and I saw his face,” Liam said, slowly. “When the candles suddenly flared, he was surprised. No, he was more than surprised, he was _shocked_! That ritual never worked before, I’m betting. Before last night, he didn’t really think any of his bullshit was real.” Liam had let that all out in a venomous whisper. 

Before Harry could reply or rebuke, Liam shushed him with a sharp gesture. Zayn had finished with his incantation and was walking towards them. The misericord’s tip glistened with blood, the source of which was a shallow gash on the man’s exposed forearm. 

“Did you cut yourself?” Liam said flatly. 

“Yeah,” Zayn shrugged, “but just a little. You guys ready?” 

“We’re not going to traipse around this place with you dripping all over the carpets for one of Lord Calder’s cleaners to find,” Harry chided, “Plus, blood is a bitch to remove. Trust me, I know.” Zayn snorted and pulled out a handkerchief which he used to bandage the wound. Harry nodded in approval. 

“Now can we go?” 

Harry held up a finger and retrieved a camera and a camcorder, handing the latter to Liam. Zayn wiped the silver knife with the hem of his shirt and slipped it into a ready sheathe at his belt. Liam also tucked on of the sound recorders into his pocket. Thus armed, they set out to map the ground floor of the accursed mansion. 

They first catalogued the chambers between the living room and the Great Hall, as they had already been through them. The space beyond their makeshift camp was a trophy room, heads of animals staring accusingly from the walls and even a stuffed tiger snarling in one corner. This was followed by a room dominated by a massive fireplace, its yawning mouth big enough for at least four men to stand abreast. Musical instruments were arrayed around the next one, with a centuries old harpsichord on a small stage as the centre piece. The room before the Great Hall was a parlour, plush settees and ottomans arranged near low tables and a mahogany liquor cabinet. 

Liam would sweep the camcorder over every inch of each room, while Harry photographed everything of interest, from furniture to furnishings to architectural details. Zayn, for his part, scanned through every book, map, painting or tapestry, searching for anything remotely arcane. Occasionally, Liam would murmur a voice memo into the sound recorder. 

Harry was anxious, at first, to take photographs of anything. He had seen enough horror movies (albeit through squinted eyes and splayed fingers, with Liam snorting at his cowardice) to know that cameras drew ghosts and demons like moths to a flame. In his first dozen shots, he expected to see hosts of damned souls swarming around mounted stag heads and belching forth from under armchairs. 

However, as the morning wore on, he found that no spirits were manifesting in his photos. No blood-splattered spectres lounged in the parlour, and no Japanese girls without proper hair products and tacky white dresses crawled Cirque de Soleil style out of the massive fireplace. In fact, the work was kind of tedious, though that didn’t stop Harry from being any less thorough. Just…vaguely disappointing. 

At exactly noon, according to Liam’s watch, they reached the Great Hall. The chalk pattern was still there, white veins on black wood, and so was the congealed mess of wax. Harry turned sharply away once he saw it. They were too far away for him to even distinguish the feathered part, but he did not want to see the terrified sculpted faces again. Still, the three of them repeated their procedure, though Harry did not photograph the evidence of Zayn’s divination ritual. 

“We have to clean this up before we go,” sighed Liam when they had finished, rubbing his eyes behind his glasses. Zayn said nothing, he merely nodded and began walking out of the hall. “Where are you going?” Liam called out, slightly exasperated. 

“I’m fucking starving. We can do the north side of the bloody place after we eat!” Zayn exclaimed as he disappeared from sight. 

“I am kinda hungry, too,” Harry said timidly. Liam shook his head but voiced no protests. They returned to their camp, if such a term was applicable in an indoor setting. Harry thougt that it was more than fitting, for the house was doubtless as dangerous as any jungle. There was also an aura of alien hostility to the place that no wilderness could emanate. 

  
  


They ate while reviewing the videos, photographs and notes they had accumulated over the course of the morning. Liam played their footage on his laptop so that they could all see. Harry shut his eye through all of it, though he shouldn’t have bothered. Both the camcorder and the camera had not registered anything eerie. Zayn had found no incriminating information in any of the books, nor were there any cult insignias of any sort. All three of them poured over Harry’s photographs but there were no clues in any of them. 

“So, we’ve got nothing,” Liam sighed, rubbing at his eyes again, glasses held loosely to his side. Zayn was sprawled on the couch, reading one of his leather-bound books. Harry, sitting next to Liam, rested his head on his friend’s shoulder. For a moment, Liam relaxed, one hand reaching up to idly tug at one of Harry’s curls. 

And then he was all business once more. Liam stood up and picked up the camcorder before clapping sharply. The noise rang out in the dismal silence of the house, repeating and diminishing down the rooms. “We still have to go over the north side,” he said, determination overcoming tiredness. 

There were only four rooms to the right of the entrance hall, but they were larger than their counterparts on the other side of the house. And far more sinister. The first room was, of all things, a statuary. Replicas of famous classical sculptures crowded the lofty space, Venus de Milo rubbing elbows with Michelangelo’s David and the Dying Gaul. They would have been perfect copies, but for a flaw they all shared: all the sculpture’s heads had been chiselled off. The three of them did their usual sweep of the room, the small hairs on their nape standing on end. 

The following chamber wasn’t any less unsettling, for it was a windowless gallery. By the light of their various devices, paintings seemed to rear out of the shadow-riddled walls. Zayn’s sharp intake of breath was magnified in the long room, the cause of it being a massive painting of such realism that it seemed its occupants would step out of the canvas and assault them. It was a painting of a hilltop, shrouded in night. Hooded figures were dancing and gyrating around a roaring bonfire, arms thrown about in abandon, hands clenched around crude weapons of bone and stone. In the heart of the fire, a lone child screamed into the air as the flames consumed him. Hovering over the scene, directly above the hilltop but undoubtedly as distant as the stars, was the black void studded with eyes that they had come to know as Alyabar. 

The other specimens of art were no less disturbing, depicting alien scenes of unfathomable loneliness and tableaus of human sacrifice where men and animals were despoiled interchangeably. Harry felt lightheaded as he took photograph after photograph of each ghastly painting, the desire to succeed overcoming the desire to scream and tear apart the loathsome images. 

They emerged from the gallery into a lavish dining room, dominated by a massive table of dark wood. Though it could easily have seated forty, there were only four chairs around the altar-like slab. They combed through the room, with Harry even crawling underneath the table to see whether it hid anything under its lacquered surface. 

The last chamber were the kitchens, a nearly labyrinthine space full of cupboards and cabinets, counters and contrivances. Here, the trappings of the modern day were everywhere, from high-end juicers to gleaming electric stoves and pristine ovens. Harry was impressed by the appliances, all were in the same calibre of those used by the finest of restaurants. He was sure that Mrs Kenna, she of the banana-cinnamon loaf, would have seriously maimed someone to have the oven that took up a corner of the kitchens. 

Liam pointed out the door to a walk-in freezer and all of them suddenly became very anxious as the crowded around it. Who knew what kind of meat would be waiting in its cold depths? After a tense moment, Liam reached out and pulled it open. The thing wasn’t even on, which was logical, and not a single slab of meat, human or otherwise, occupied its insides. Harry stealthily let out a scream that he had been holding up as a prolonged exhalation. 

A small, discreetly painted wooden door led, mercifully, to the Great Hall. Obviously it had been used to ferry morsels to the enormous room during special occasions. Harry heaved a great sigh of relief as they crossed the now-familiar chalked-marred floor. The dark gallery, with its insane imagery, had been daunting the first time. He did not relish the idea of going through it a second time. 

Harry suddenly stopped in the middle of the cavernous space. Above him, the spiked iron chandelier dangled like Damocles’ sword. Slowly, he turned and walked to the cascading burgundy curtains that hid the windows. He reached out and twitched the curtains a fraction of an inch open. 

The window had been built to face the west and the last rays of the dying sun speared through the room, painting Harry in scarlet radiance. He seemed to be coated in heart’s blood, making him look both pathetic and gruesome. Harry looked below, and saw that in this hour, in this light, the pallid sea of fog was transformed into a roiling blanket of scarlet fire. The terrible beauty of it transfixed him until a hand gripped his shoulder. 

Startled, he turned and nearly collided with Liam, who was looking at him with concern. Zayn leaned against the heavy doors with a contemplative expression. Unbearable regret, swept over Harry as he closed the gap in the curtains. 

After so much gloom, a little light, no matter how murderous the cast, seemed like paradise. 

Harry allowed himself to be shepherded back to their living room camp, Liam at his side and Zayn leading the way. He looked back over his shoulder, hoping to catch a glimpse of the sunlight, and froze. 

His eyes had locked on the door to the kitchens. Closed, it would have melded seamlessly with the wall, as unobtrusive as the servants who once slaved in it were meant to be. It was slightly ajar now, though Harry knew that the hinges were on springs, meant to close them as soon as a servant passed through. And in that small opened sliver was darkness. 

And the darkness _seethed_. Darker shapes writhed in that sliver, like serpents undulating in an inky swamp. As if the…entity had felt his gaze, the door swung shut. For a moment, Harry saw a tiny tendril disappear into the slit, like a rat’s tail. 

“What’s the matter? Are you alright?” Liam said from beside him. 

Harry shook his head mutely and continued walking. He would tell them, but not here. 

Zayn was right. The shadows here were not to be trusted. Could anything in this house be trusted? 

Liam’s scepticism aside, Harry truly did feel safer behind the swirling runes that Zayn swore would guard them. As Liam connected the camcorder to his laptop and Zayn once more pondered over his books, Harry checked the video of the camera he had left to record the room in their absence. 

He did now know whether to feel glad or defeated by the absence of anything supernatural in the footage. But he saved it into his own laptop for safekeeping. If anything, it would prove that they had actually investigated the house. 

Harry was about to speak when Liam groaned and stood up. Zayn merely raised his eyebrows. “We still have to search the inner rooms,” Liam said, stretching before taking up the camcorder once more. 

Zayn echoed Liam’s groan, though Harry had no idea whether the slightly sexual tone the man added was intentional. Liam flushed a little but stayed silent and stomped to the entry hall. “Well, let’s get this over with then,” Zayn said, as if nothing had happened. He bent down and picked up an LED lamp. 

Harry hesitated. There was something out there, something wreathed in shadow. But the exploration of the house was paramount. They had to finish this quickly for the longer they stayed here, the more likely the villagers would discover their presence. 

The more likely that the thing in the shadows would swoop into action. 

Still, an ounce of prevention was better than a pounding. Wait, no. An ounce of prevention was better than a _pound_ of cure. God, Harry’s mind was clearly still halfway into the gutter. 

Shaking his head, Harry grabbed a crowbar and a road flare. The crowbar was of titanium, much lighter and more durable than the common steel version. It would serve well in combat. The road flare was a last resort. A compacted stick of magnesium that could burn at three thousand degrees Celsius was formidable weapon, in Harry’s opinion. He twirled it in one hand before putting it in his pocket. 

As he was about to step out of the room, he stopped and went to the pile of Zayn’s things. With a furtive glance, he stuffed a long piece of chalk into the back pocket of his jeans. Somehow, he believed that the brittle mineral would be of help. After all, Zayn used them to ward their things and to pry answers out of nowhere. Perhaps he could elicit some arcane power from it when he would need it most. 

It was a hope as fragile as the chalk itself. But if there was one thing Harry had never lacked, it was hope. Reassured by those three objects, he followed Liam and Zayn. 

They were waiting for him at the third archway in the entrance hall, this one built opposite of the main doors. Liam raised an eyebrow at the crowbar but said nothing, no doubt seeing the wisdom in bringing it. Zayn turned on the LED lamp, and under its clinical radiance, they proceeded into the house. 

Past the archway, a grand staircase climbed further into the house. Curving hallways disappeared in the dark on either side of the staircase, parallel to the outer rooms that they had already gone through. They took their requisite photographs and footage of the staircase but did not climb it. That would be tomorrow’s task. Instead, Liam led them down the left hallway. 

A cramped servants’ quarters was the first door they encountered, and Liam guessed that it would have a counterpart on the other hallway. The quarters weren’t squalid, merely extremely austere and cramped. They investigated as they had done the entire day, combing every nook and cranny of the space and documenting it. Given how remarkably confining the room was, they did not have an easy time of it. 

They continued down the corridor with its curved construction, their footsteps echoing. Harry occasionally glanced over his shoulder, one hand tight around the crowbar, the other poised over the road flare. The light of the lamp could only illuminate so far, and with each step they took, shadows followed them, like a silent crowd. 

But these were only normal shadows, Harry thought with relief. They did not undulate like the innards of a living being, or reach out as if to grasp like the tentacles of a deep-sea horror. But he kept one hand close to the road flare, just in case. 

They came upon great iron-bound doors, perhaps halfway down the length of the corridor. Given their size, and the absence of any other such portals during their walk, Harry speculated that this room was easily the same size as the Great Hall, and that it occupied the heart of the house. Whatever lay beyond must have been important, for the doors were sealed by great lengths of chains that were fastened by an impressive lock. 

Liam gestured expansively at Harry, who grinned and flourished the crowbar. Bringing it along had been a good idea. He pushed back his long hair and stabbed the crowbar into the space between the body of the lock and the hasp. Harry loosened his shoulders, planted one foot on the great doors, and with both hands, pulled with all his might. 

The lock held for all of six seconds before, with a sharp, metallic snap, it succumbed. Chains dribbled to the floor, reminding Harry of the intestines of pigs he had gutted open when he was a butcher. He heard Zayn give a long, low whistle. 

The man was eyeing him, dark eyes considering. He must have looked quite impressive, muscles on his arms straining against the dark fabric of his shirt. Harry hid his smirk by turning to Liam, who had already pushed open the doors. 

All of a sudden, lights blazed from the chamber, and for a second, Harry panicked. It could be alarms, and he cursed his stupidity for not thinking of sensors and tripwires and other such traps. Liam, on the other hand, walked calmly into the room. 

It took Harry a few seconds before he realized the reason for his friend’s lack of urgency. The lights were merely on motion sensors, and their radiance were not the alarming blues and reds of security measures, but rather a mellow, softly yellow incandescence. No windows marred the walls of the rectangular room, so that none of the buttery light could escape to betray their presence. 

The lighting was appropriate for the setting, with walls covered by shelves upon shelves of books and floor occupied by yet more stands of tomes and lofty chairs. The vaulted, arched, ceiling was reminiscent of a cathedral, and in a way, the room was a place of worship. 

They had entered an immense library. 

  
  


The madness in darkness drew back from the sudden radiance. It had been so close to one of its targets, clinging like cloying smoke to the ceiling of the hallway. How pathetically human of its hunt to not look up. Beasts of the field, beasts for eating, had no such capability. 

The light scalded it, like acid. And now they were entering the room, where it could not abide the strong illumination. It coiled its tentacles in frustration and scraped its claws in hunger. Reluctantly, it slipped into the deeper miasma of the hallways to wait for another opportunity. 

Hungry. It was so hungry. The hooded man who had fashioned it, moulded it, from excess, cast-off essence had not given it any food, but had instead given endless instructions. 

_Harm not those of the Brethren._

_Hunt down any intruders into this Hallowed House._

_Protect the Covetous Dark as it slumbers._

And, most importantly, _Obey the Opener of the Way in its every command._ The last one had been the hardest lesson, the most ingrained by fire and hated light. It had not eaten since the day of its creation, the day of those harsh lessons and commands. 

Now it starved, and it wanted them all, all three humans, torn to pieces and devoured. Given the chance, it would tear them limb from limb, feasting on their screams. 

But the Covetous Dark had spoken, and even now, the madness in the darkness shuddered and churned in terror at that voice. It had been commanded, and there was no refusing the Harbinger of Whispers. 

_BRING ME THE BOY_ , it had said, its twin eyes of purest blue light wracking the madness with pain, _BRING ME THE BOY WITH THE GREEN EYES._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to all of you wonderful readers! Also, the entity worshiped by the cultists is a modified version of the DnD monster Allabar. 
> 
> Apologies if this fic seems to be taking forever, but its sort of quasi-real novel thing for me. Dont you worry, though, things are about to get intense ;)


	6. Hollow House:The Tome and the Taking

_Beware the one before whose heart the swallows fly, for he shall protect the Harbinger of Whispers._

_Beware the one whose loins give forth laurels, for he shall choose the future of the Opener of the Way._

_Beware the one whose wrist is tied, for he shall be bound to It That Peers From Shadow._

_Beware, my Brethren, for he shall lead us to victory._

-From “The Labyrinth of Worlds”, Book of S----, verses 23 to 26. 

  
  


The stack of books made quite a loud thump as they hit the table. By Liam’s count, that was the twenty third stack that Zayn had transferred to the table they occupied, and there were still thousands more books to flip through. Liam had already brushed through forty six volumes, while Zayn had gone through thirty nine. Harry was still halfway through his tenth, which was a graphically illustrated copy of _Arabian Nights_.

If all the tales were as erotic as the one Harry was currently reading, Liam thought, Scheherazade could give E.L. James a run for her money. 

Shaking his head, Liam turned back to his own book. It was a treatise on the wonders of phrenology. Liam just gave each page a quick scan before returning it to its shelf. He carefully searched the nearest stack of books before selecting a large red leather-bound manuscript. As he opened it, he looked at Zayn with as much discretion as he could. 

The self-proclaimed occultist was engrossed in a small cloth bound book. His long fingers drummed a listless tattoo on the hard wood. He seemed to be fully at ease, at home, around so many books. The dark pools the man had for eyes were, for once, without their angry fire. 

Abruptly, those eyes flicked up from the text and met Liam’s. And slowly, he smiled. It was only the minutest upward curve of his lips, but it was genuine. 

And, despite himself, Liam smiled back. 

Harry’s loud groan of frustration made both of them jump. The third member of their small expedition had buried his face into the pages of _Arabian Nights_. “This could take _forever_ , you guys,” Harry groaned. Liam gave him a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. 

Part of why Harry had quit university was his disinclination to reading anything longer than a YA novel. Liam, on the other hand, had been tackling Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Virginia Woolf at the age of twelve.

“He’s right,” Liam commiserated, glancing briefly at the volume he had chosen. The title proclaimed that it was an illustrated history of carpets. Such frivolity the entitled had in choosing their reading materials. 

“What do you suggest, then?” Zayn snorted, resuming his reading, “I don’t see a computer anywhere, much less a fucking card catalogue.” 

“It’s not like Calder would put _Maiming Sacrifices for Dummies_ in a card catalogue anyway,” Harry continued, somewhat muffled since he had not deigned to lift his head. “This is a rich person library, it’s only meant to look good and knowledgy.” 

Liam considered that and agreed. Nearly all his clients had had grand bookshelves filled with similar leather bound books in their offices or homes. And not one of them had read said books, or even knew what they really were about. 

“If there’s nothing important or incriminating here, why padlock the room?” Zayn asked patiently, long fingers flipping pages. 

“I don’t know,” Harry admitted, raising his head and resting it on one hand. “It’s not like he was hiding being a freaky bloke, what with those paintings.” 

“An interest in occult artistry isn’t by itself suspicious,” Liam said carefully. “But finding a text on occult worship and practices would raise a few eyebrows.” 

He tapped Zayn on the shoulder, since the man was still bent on examining the book he held. “You said that Alyabar was only mentioned only in the worst books, right? So if one were to actually have copies of books like those, they’d hide them, particularly if they’re not supposed to have interests in such subjects.” 

Zayn frowned at the notion, but slowly nodded. “I had to break into a depository to find a legible English translation of _Der Vermis Mysteriss_.”

“But Lord Calder wouldn’t want to draw attention to himself by keeping the books anywhere else but here. Even archivists have to know what they’re keeping and banks have cameras and high traffic,” Liam went on, speaking faster as his excitement grew, “This house, on the other hand, no one knows he owns it, and even then it’s isolated and the villagers could guard it, assuming that they’re cultists as well.” 

From the corner of his eye, he saw Zayn opening his mouth to speak, but Harry forestalled him by running a hand over the other man’s face. 

“But what if people found the place and broke in anyway? Then he’d have to hide the books someplace where they’ll be hard to find, and what better place than an enormous library!” He was on his feet now, pacing rapidly around the table. “People would just assume that the books would be somewhere in the shelves and spend hours looking, when in fact, they won’t be in the shelves!” Liam finished with what was nearly a shout. 

“So you’re saying that he’s hidden any occult tome somewhere else in the house?” Zayn said, wiping his face with a hand and grimacing at Harry. 

“No, what I’m saying is that they’d be in here, but not among the other books,” Liam explained. “Why risk them being found when you can hide them behind a locked door and waste an intruder’s time? There are occult books here, the worst kind, but hidden.” 

“What makes you so sure?” 

Liam stopped. Zayn had spoken in the same quiet tone he had used the night before when he asked why Liam thought he was criminal. And again he had no answer. The feeling of being right, of instinctively knowing, had just come over him. Again. 

“Does it matter?” Harry interrupted, “Let’s search the room, but can we find a way that _doesn’t_ take hours? It’s nearly two a.m.” 

Liam shook his head. “I’m tired, too, Harry,” he began, “but it’s not like we have magi-” 

Zayn gave a small cough. Harry grinned, eyes suddenly shining with excitement. Liam whipped off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He had walked straight into that one. 

“I think I know a way,” Zayn said, smiling. 

  
  


The madness slithered and skittered, its pseudopods and pincers grasping walls and ceilings but leaving no marks. Its body of oily essence oozed behind its frantic limbs. 

It needed the boy, the boy whose laughter had so fascinated That Which Peers From Shadow. It needed to take him, and soon. But how? The boy was protected by cursed light, by the baffling contraptions that mortals had somehow ensnared the radiance of the sun and stars. 

An undulating tendril caressed a wire, and it felt the energy pulsing through it, like blood in an artery. 

Of course! How simple! How magnificent! The madness did not know how those glowing bulbs worked, blasted hated things! But it knew how bodies worked. 

How a strong organism relied on a collection of fragile filaments of flesh. 

How a torn tendon could collapse a towering foe. 

How a snapped spine could incapacitate a mighty opponent. 

How a harrowed heart could kill a fierce enemy. 

It had no mouth, no maw, but if it did, the madness in darkness would have smiled. 

Its tentacles and spiny limbs fanned out, feeling the flow of the energy that fed the fiendish fluorescence. Slowly, it crawled towards the heart of the energy. And when it reached it, the madness would stop it strangle it, suffocate it and stop it dead. 

  
  


Zayn had asked for pen and paper, and Liam had reluctantly handed over his favourite pen and notebook, extricated with care from his back pocket. The occultist was now bent over a page, inscribing patterns and pictographs. 

Harry was recording the process on the camcorder that Liam had brought. They had no camera with them, though, because Harry had forgotten to retrieve it when they had briefly stopped to rest in their camp. Honestly, Liam did not know how Harry managed to function day to day with such a ridiculous susceptibility for distraction. 

Zayn stood up, holding three thin strips of paper with the same sets of images and vortices on them. He handed one to each of them. 

“What am I supposed to do with this?” Liam demanded, examining the scrap of paper. 

“Put it in your mouth.” 

“Where have I heard that one before?” Harry muttered. 

Liam ignored the comment. “How is this supposed to work?” he said instead. 

“The incantation on the paper will focus our latent precognitive abilities,” Zayn explained. “All humans have a tiny measure of psychic power, this is just meant to focus it. At least until the paper dissolves. So we have to move quickly, and follow our first instinct the moment we put the paper in our mouths. Also, swallow it, don’t spit it out. We don’t wanna leave a mess.” 

“Where have I heard tha-”

“Shut up, Harry,” Liam hissed. 

Chuckling, Harry took one strip and stuffed it into his mouth. Liam did the same, but with great care. Zayn smiled smugly at him before following suit. 

For a beat, none of them did anything. Liam grimaced from the sharp flavourlessness of the paper. 

Zayn closed his eyes, concentrating. Harry, on the other hand, immediately rushed to one of the shelves and plucked a book. Liam simply felt incredibly stupid. And seeing Zayn concentrating on his “latent precognitive abilities” just made him feel even stupider. 

Well, the man had said to follow the first instinct, and Liam’s mind was telling him to get away from Zayn before he spat the soggy strip of paper at his face. He stalked to a far corner of the library, where a trio of chairs big and ornate enough to be thrones stood. In exasperation, both at himself and the fruitlessness of their adventure, he threw himself unto one of the chairs. 

As he landed on the seat, the sudden movement must have accidentally triggered a delicate mechanism within the chair. Liam felt an almost imperceptible vibration before he heard a tiny click. He looked down, and saw that on the underside of the chair, a hidden drawer had slid out. 

Liam swallowed the soggy paper. 

Cautiously, he pulled the drawer fully out. There, resting in a neat stack in the drawer, were three slender tomes bound in leather. 

“Son of a bitch,” Liam whispered. He carefully took out the three tomes and carried them reverently to their table. 

“Guess my telekinesis isn’t as great as I thought it was,” Harry said glumly. The book he had plucked with such certainty had turned out to be a collection of erotic poetry. 

“Telemetry, Harry. Telekinesis is moving things with your mind,” Liam said absentmindedly. He opened the first of the books and shuddered. The cover was only of age-hardened black leather, yet he felt as if merely touching it, he risked contracting some ancient malediction. 

The inner pages were of thick, creamy vellum. Inscribed in blocky, graceless letters was the title: _The Labyrinth of Worlds_. In horrid fascination, Liam turned page after page. The work was in English, but that only made it possible for Liam to register phrases and sentences that no man who valued sanity should ever read. 

It was written haphazardly, with the text sometimes going from right to left, or upside down, or in spirals. There were paragraphs written between paragraphs or crammed between illustrations of Things that seemed to have been dreamed up by the worst madmen. Sometimes the authors, for there were as many different styles of handwriting as there were oddities, seemed to have lost all higher brain functions, for the text would often degenerate into ramblings and illegible scribbles and symbols. 

The soft whisper of “Fuck me sideways,” announced that Zayn had joined him in browsing the book. 

Suddenly, Harry reached out and stopped Liam form turning the page. He pointed to an illustration that covered nearly all of a sheet. At first, Liam thought that the madman who drew it had merely splattered some ink but on closer inspection, he saw the suggestion of something in the black mess. It depicted a…a _thing_ made of oily, sinuous tentacles and jagged pincers, all crammed together to crown a bloated sack of a body. 

What little text there was on the page was crammed in the margins and between the grasping appendages of the vile abomination. “‘Praise be unto the Glimpses of Alyabar’” Zayn read, “‘the executioners of Its will, beloved of shadow, feasters in the night and enemies of the light.’” 

“I think…” Harry whispered, “I…I saw that. This afternoon.” 

  
  


The madness, the Glimpse of Alyabar, writhed in pleasure. It had found the source of the damnable energy. The twisting metallic arteries all converged into one enormous conduit, thicker than its grasping limbs. The cable disappeared into the rock of the hill, and the Glimpse, with its preternatural perceptions, sensed that the energy streaming through it came from a great distance. 

This was not the heart it had been searching for, but it was good enough. After all, a burst artery could be just as devastating as a torn heart. 

It raised its pincer-tipped limbs and tensed. 

  
  


Liam looked up at Harry. His friend had gone a sickly pallor, green eyes brimming with fear. Liam wished Harry was lying, but he knew his friend too well. “Why didn’t you tell us?” he said, gathering the books, their most solid evidence so far, to his chest. 

“I thought I just imagined it,” Harry replied, voice beginning to tremble. “Would you have believed me anyway?” 

“Are you sure?” Zayn hissed, one hand reaching in his jacket for his misericord. 

“Of course I’m fucking sure!” shouted Harry, standing up and scrubbing a hand over his face. He looked near vomiting, one hand grasping at something in his back pocket, the other had the crowbar in a death-grip. Liam followed suit, almost toppling his seat. 

“We have to get back,” Harry continued, striding towards the heavy doors. “Back to camp, to those symbols and to our shit.” 

Liam swore under his breath before rushing behind Harry. Zayn, knife partially raised, followed. 

  
  


The Glimpse brought down its scything limbs in one powerful motion. Against the tide of maddened shadow, the artifices of mortalkind proved weak. The cable was cleaved in two, throwing a great actinic burst. It threw burning, hated light at the Glimpse for all of a split second. 

The Glimpse let loose a silent shriek, perceptible to mortal animals only as a discordant silence that would have driven those with keener ears to deafness.

Maddened, scalded, ravenous, the Glimpse tore out of the small chamber. In its alien, primeval sentience, the first part was over. Now it hunted. 

  
  


The lights went out. Liam barely stifled a shriek as his mind suddenly exploded with acidic fear. He heard Harry let out a frightened sob before a cold radiance suddenly bloomed. Zayn had turned on the LED lamp. 

“We have to get the fuck back to base,” the occultist declared. Liam nodded, heart thumping in alarm. He fished his phone out of his pocket and activated the flashlight. Its weaker glow comforted him simply because he held it. He made his was to Harry. 

His friend was frantically pushing the doors, breath coming in ragged puffs as he tried to open them. Liam saw in one hand, Harry was grasping a long, slim piece of chalk. 

“Harry,” Liam said, softly. The other man did not seem to hear, instead redoubling his efforts to escape. He had dropped the crowbar in his fright. With one hand still holding the chalk, he was shoving the door with the other. 

As gently as he could, Liam removed Harry’s hand from the door. Harry turned to him, eyes wild with terror, tears beginning to form. Truthfully, Liam felt the same. His heart was drumming, his throat felt bone dry and his palms were coated in sweat. But he had to retain his mind, his mental acuity despite the overwhelming fear. 

“Harry,” Liam repeated, cupping his friend’s face, “The doors swing inside. You need to pull them.” 

Zayn let out a small, manic giggle. 

Liam guided Harry to the side, towards Zayn. The occultist wrapped an arm around Harry’s shoulders, whispering comforting, yet meaningless, phrases. Liam turned back to the doors and pulled them open. 

And darkness, a writhing wall of maddening darkness, poured in. 

A thick tendril lashed out and struck Liam squarely in the stomach. The blow was powerful enough to send him flying, crashing against a table with bruising strength. Dimly, he heard Zayn screaming, the light of the lamp spinning wildly as the occultist tried to defend himself. The air was filled with the sound of thrashing pseudopods and the clicking of segmented arms. 

Harry screamed once, and the thrashing and clicking cacophony rose to a ghastly crescendo. And all was suddenly silent. 

Liam tried to rise, to stand, but his body seemed unwilling to cooperate. All he could do was raise his head, vision swimming. Through a haze, he saw Zayn leaning limply against a shelf, the lamp flickering feebly at his feet, half buried by books. The doors of the library swung lopsidedly on torn hinges. 

Of Harry, there was no sign. 

The weight of the despair and terror finally broke upon Liam. In response, Liam fled to the realm of unconsciousness. 

  
  


Absolute, viscous darkness. 

The sickening feel of various appendages coiling, unfurling, pinching, grasping. 

The gut-wrenching feeling of swift, undulant motion. 

The growing pain in his chest as air began to diminish, as his lungs strained. 

Suddenly, freedom! Flight! Falling! Flailing! 

Harry crashed into a stony floor, clattering into a profusion of brittle, stick-like things. He was still in the dark, sprawled and scratched from his ejection. For a second, his mind teetered on the edge. The edge of what, he did not dare confirm. He dared not think, only perceived. Neither did he move, for fear that any motion would bring the Thing down on him again. 

Finally, after what seemed like hours, Harry felt rational thought and motion seep through the dams of fright. He sat up, wincing as every part of him seemed to sing with pain. Stretching his limbs, his legs scattering what most likely were bones, he confirmed that none of them seemed to be broken or sprained. 

His right hand was coated with fine, gritty particles that stuck on the sweat of his palm. He realized that he had crushed the chalk he had so reverently carried. Curling the hand into a fist, and biting down a groan of pain, Harry confirmed he had flailed the arm around during his taking. 

Next, he took out every item he carried on him. The road flare had not been jostled out of his pocket, and Harry silently thanked the inventor of skin-tight jeans. Neither had his iPhone, and to his surprise, it was without damage. 

He very nearly cried as the screen lit up, the electronic light rekindling his hope. Because he had not used it at all during their investigations, its battery was still at ninety percent. He immediately activated the flashlight. 

The chamber he had been confined in was cylindrical, perhaps forty feet in diameter and sixty feet high. It was a natural formation, with teeth of stone dripping down from the ceiling and stalagmites rising from the perimeter of the bowl-like floor. Crude steps had once descended from a small crevice, the only entrance into the grotto, to the bottom. Now, several steps had broken off, leaving a gap of at least fifteen feet between the broken segments. 

Harry brought the beam of the phone down on the cavern floor and confirmed that bones did cover it, great heaps of them had been tossed to the sides. He knew he was looking at the remains of the long-ago sacrifice to the Covetous Dark. 

He felt no fear of the twisted and hacked remains. Instead, he felt a deep but distant anguish for them. No one was innocent, but no one deserved to die like they had. No one deserved a restless afterlife. 

Steeling his resolve, he began to take picture after picture, as he had in the gallery. He felt more comfortable taking photos of the bones, despite their tragic providence, than he had when doing the same with the paintings. 

At least, these had been people, human. They were not antithetical to nature, not alien and menacing as the paintings had been. 

Harry made his way around the cavern, taking care not to step on or break any of the skeletal debris. He saw that coarse robes, mostly rotten and crumbling, had been abandoned among them. As he was halfway around, he heard the smallest sound to his side. 

A flood of fright nearly overwhelmed him. He twisted, aiming the beam of light directly at where he had heard the sound spring forth. It had come from behind two stalagmites, their gradual growth fusing their bases. 

Harry, blood thundering in his veins, knees shaking, rounded the columns. 

There, huddled and hiding, was a slight figure shrouded in one of the rotten vestments that had been left behind. Under the glare of the light, the figure looked up at Harry. 

It was a boy. No, a man, but slender enough that he could be mistaken for one. From under the fraying hood of the tattered robe, a tangle of light brown hair thatched a slight, elfin face. The man looked at Harry with the most brilliant blue eyes he had ever seen. 

And they regarded him with an assessing caution. In a charnel house, deep beneath the earth, possibly the lair of a horror made of darkness, the man conveyed no fear. 

Harry backed away from the man. He did not retreat because of the alarming revelation that somehow, another human had found his way to the depths of Exham Priory. He did not retreat because said man was calm and calculating. 

Harry retreated because the great anticipation, the almost elated edge that had grown in him since taking the adventure, that had been shunted aside by suspense and self-preservation, had been satisfied the moment those ice blue eyes had met his own. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaaaaaand welcome Louis! Thanks again for anyone reading this! Comment for questions and for criticisms!


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